The electronic representation of texts completely changes the text’s status; for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location; against the relations of contiguity established in the print objects, it opposes the free composition of infinitely manipulable fragments; in place of the immediate apprehension of the whole work, made visible by the object that embodies it, it introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders.
Roger Chartier, “Representations of the Written Word,” in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 18.
It's that simple. Really. In this one sentence.
Our complexity, fragmentation, and dissolution. As with the "object" that is a book; so the "object" that is the human.
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